Thinking Outside the Toolbox: Looking Beyond the Secretary-General’s Review of UN Peace Operations
The Secretary-General’s long-awaited “Review on the Future of All Forms of United Nations Peace Operations” (the Review) is out. And if there is one thing everybody loves to do, it is finding reasons to criticize a new UN report. Yes, there may be many things to disagree with, but the Review is also a thoughtful effort to analyze how dramatically the environment for UN peace operations has changed and it gets several important things right, ranging from its frank assessment of the challenges surrounding host-state consent to its call for the UN and Member States to reinvest in mediation and good offices.
The Review returns to many familiar issues that have long been central to debates around UN peace operations: the need for focused and achievable mandates; creating better alignment between mandates and resources; engaging in more meaningful consultation with troop– and police-contributing countries; the importance of grounding peace operations in sound political strategies to secure peace; and, the Brahimi Report adage about the importance of the Secretariat telling the Security Council “what it needs to know, not what it wants to hear.”
In their discussion following the Secretary-General's presentation of the Review on 26 August 2026, Member States broadly welcomed the Review and emphasized many of these same challenges, demonstrating that, even if several of the ideas and recommendations in the Review are not new, they remain important—and no less necessary to implement.
Of particular interest is the Review’s call for a more flexible and differentiated approach to peace operations. This emphasis on more tailored forms of engagement resonates with arguments John Norris and I made in our recent White Paper “Reviving Peace and Security at the UN: UN80 and Beyond,” which we published shortly before the Review was issued. While peace operations—both peacekeeping operations (PKOs) and special political missions (SPMs)—certainly have their place in the UN’s peace and security toolbox, we argued that, at the same time, the UN should become “less mission-centric” and embrace additional approaches that are smaller, more agile, and more targeted towards specific aspects of a conflict, particularly when a comprehensive peace agreement remains out of reach. We highlighted the UN Verification and Inspection Mechanism for Yemen (UNVIM) and the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI) as useful examples of focused arrangements that combined political, technical, and operational capabilities to achieve concrete objectives even as the conflicts continued and prospects for broader negotiations remained limited. These mechanisms are not peace operations—and differ considerably from one another—but they offer important insight about the kind of flexible approach that the Review advocates.
From Christmas Trees to Distribution of Responsibilities
The Review recognizes that a peace operation does not need—and should not try—to do everything. Rather, peace operations should focus more sharply on political and security functions, and Member States should avoid the habit of adding one task after another to a mission’s mandate like Christmas tree ornaments. The Review specifically envisages relevant programmatic tasks and their associated resources being transferred to other UN entities better equipped to deliver them, with UN Country Teams (UNCTs) assuming greater responsibility for longer-term peace consolidation. Distributing responsibilities according to the comparative advantages of different entities on the ground is a promising approach. However, for any such division of labor to work, the corresponding UN entities must be given adequate resources, and peace operations and UNCTs should be connected through common analysis, planning and a political strategy.
Several Member States raised similar concerns at the discussion on 26 August 2026, stressing that responsibilities transferred to UN Country Teams and other UN entities would need to be accompanied by adequate capacity and resources. Others cautioned that a sharper division of responsibilities should not dilute priorities such as the protection of civilians, human rights, and women, peace, and security.
The idea of drawing on the comparative advantages of different UN entities echoes one of the lessons we drew from the arrangements examined in “Reviving Peace and Security”: some of the UN’s recent innovative peace and security efforts demonstrate what is possible when the UN draws effectively on capabilities from across the UN system. UNVIM is managed by the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) and was established in partnership with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), while the Black Sea Grain Initiative drew on expertise from OCHA, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the International Maritime Organization. Despite their very different purposes and structures, each illustrates the value of bringing together different parts of the UN system—and, where appropriate, external partners—around a specific peace and security objective.
Between and Beyond the Peace Operations Spectrum
In the Pact for the Future, Member States gave the Secretary-General an ambitious mandate for the Review, asking him to consider how the UN peace operations toolbox could be adapted to respond to evolving needs and enable “more agile, tailored responses to existing, emerging and future challenges.” However, as other analysts have pointed out, even though the Review talks about a “spectrum of peace operations,” it continues to differentiate peace operations into the two categories of UN operations, peacekeeping operations (managed by the Department of Peace Operations – DPO) and special political missions (managed by the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs – DPPA), as well as Security Council-authorized peace enforcement operations undertaken by non-UN actors.
The Review recognizes that the idea of a spectrum leaves room for operations that do not fit neatly within those categories. In fact, one of the more successful UN peace operations of the last decade—the UN Mission in Colombia, which supported the monitoring and verification of the ceasefire between the Colombian state and the former FARC-EP guerrilla group as part of a tripartite mechanism bringing together the UN and both parties—falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Although classified as a special political mission and managed by what was then the Department of Political Affairs, the Mission in many ways looked more like a traditional peacekeeping operation focused on ceasefire monitoring except, in this case, the UN international observers were unarmed. The Mission was able to accomplish its mandate in large part because of the political willingness of both parties and unity in the Security Council, but also because it was a time-bound mission with narrow objectives that was tailor-made for the specific context and designed jointly by the UN and both parties. (Its successor mission—the UN Verification Mission in Colombia—currently verifiescompliance with other parts of the Colombian Final Peace Agreement and does look more like an SPM.) A similar arrangement had previously been used in Nepal, where the UN Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), a political mission deployed from 2007 to 2011, helped monitor the management of arms and armed personnel and assist in monitoring the ceasefire.
Some of the UN’s most interesting recent contributions to peace and security have come from mechanisms outside the spectrum of peace operations. UNVIM facilitates the continued flow of essential commercial goods into Yemen through the verification and inspection of commercial vessels, while helping to ensure compliance with the Security Council-mandated arms embargo. And, until Russia withdrew in 2023, the Black Sea Grain Initiative combined high-level diplomacy with a practical mechanism—the Istanbul-based Joint Coordination Centre (JCC)—that allowed more than 30 million tons of grain and food products to be transported out of the Black Sea and, in doing so, helped stabilize global food prices at a time when low- and middle-income countries were already reeling under a protracted series of inflationary shocks.'
These mechanisms were not substitutes for political settlements and did not solve the broader conflicts, nor were they intended to. They did, however, address specific dimensions of those conflicts and help mitigate some of their consequences, including in contexts where deploying a peacekeeping operation or special political mission was neither feasible nor necessarily the right response.
The three examples point to two dimensions of flexibility: greater adaptability within the peace operations spectrum, as Colombia illustrates, and a willingness to look beyond that spectrum when other forms of UN engagement may be better suited to addressing specific dimensions of a conflict through more targeted UN engagement, delivering tangible benefits and potentially alleviating humanitarian suffering, such as the BSGI and UNVIM.
The Next Secretary-General
As Member States select the next Secretary-General, the question is not only what tools the UN has at its disposal, but how they are deployed. As we argued in “Reviving Peace and Security,” the next Secretary-General should have the creativity to make full use of the tools and expertise available within the Secretariat and across the UN system; the political judgment and courage to take calculated risks; and an entrepreneurial approach to identify opportunities where, even in seemingly intractable conflicts, focused interventions can make a difference. Neither UNVIM nor the Black Sea Grain Initiative required the creation of a new Security Council-mandated peace operation. The BSGI, in particular, demonstrates the latitude a Secretary-General can have to use their good offices even against the backdrop of a divided Security Council. Importantly, the next Secretary-General should invest early in relationships with key Member States to build the political backing and trust to engage proactively in crisis situations.
Success will also depend on assembling the right leadership team. Senior appointments—including the leadership of DPPA and DPO—should bring together political astuteness, diplomatic skill and a strong track record in conflict mediation. If the UN is to make more effective use of its peace and security tools, the people leading these efforts will matter as much as the institutional arrangements themselves. Moreover, although there have been improvements in joint analysis and planning between the two departments, the new Secretary-General should push for even more integration both between them and also with other parts of the UN system, especially when developing options for the Security Council’s consideration regarding the deployment of new missions and the reconfiguration or transition of existing ones.
The next Secretary-General will inherit the Review and its recommendations. It offers a starting point, but there is also an opportunity to look beyond the boundaries of peace operations to other mechanisms through which the UN can contribute to peace and security. Doing so will require the UN—and its next Secretary-General—to think outside the toolbox. The future of UN peace and security may depend not simply on reimagining peace operations, but on reimagining the full range of tools at the UN’s disposal.